Non-random RPG brainstorming?

[Grod_The_Giant]

Disclaimer: I've never read Nobilis, Amber Diceless, or any pre-existing diceless RPG, so everything below is really just the ramblings of a deranged fool.

I was in the shower last night, re-hashing, as one does, old arguments and kicking myself for having handled things poorly. This time it was about feedback I'd given a friend about a homebrew system they'd been working on, one which relied heavily on difficult-to-calculate probabilities fumbles. Which I hated. Still hate; fumbles are a pox on gaming. But I started thinking about why I dislike them so much-- because, ultimately, they steal... not player agency so much as player concept. A fumble says "hey, you know your master swordsman character? He just lost his grip and flung his sword across the battlefield into a friend's head." "Hey, you know this guy you've been playing as a wise sage? Yeah, you just fumbled a Knowledge check, so you're pretty sure this giant ferocious lizard-monster is totally harmless and responds well to belly rubs." "Hey, you know this thing that was an important part of your concept? Well, **** you, you're going to screw it up in a terrifically embarrassing way."

But from fumbles, I got to thinking about the role of chance in games as a whole. Why do we need to attach random numbers to everything? "Only roll when failure is interesting" helps, but it could be taken so much farther. I don't want characters to fail at all based on random chance. I want them to fail because they made the wrong choices.

So! An RPG without randomness. I know diceless games exist, and I've had Nobilis on my list of things to investigate for years without actually getting a copy, but... to heck with it. I had Important Shower Thoughts. I dunno if I'll ever go much farther with this, but for the moment...

Grod's Sure-Thing Roleplaying

Skills: Characters would be skill-based, and skills would be used as permissions. Borrowing slightly from my other system, STaRS (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?361270-STaRS-the-Simple-TAbletop-Roleplaying-System-5-0), skills and challenges alike would be rated from 0-3: Common, Hero, Superhero, or God. If your skill rank is greater than the rank of the challenge you're attempting, you just succeed. Rank 1 Athletics might let you simple declare that you're climbing a brick wall or vaulting over a five foot fence. With Rank 1 Forensics, you'd simply find all available fingerprints, the time of death, and so on.

I'd ultimately like a decently in-depth skill list, coupled with enough skill points to have multiple specialties. Different games would use different caps on how many ranks you could have, depending on the genre.

Advantage: To keep things from getting too stale, I thought up Advantage. Things like spending a hero point would give you Advantage, which I see as being worth half a rank. Enough to let you win ties and succeed quicker and more stylishly at tasks. If you have double Advantage, it would let you hit the next skill rank. GMs would be encouraged to award it for creative thinking and stylish stunts.

Clashes: If you have an opposed skill check, you'd automatically beat people with a lower rank (including half-ranks, with Advantage). But since that would make combat really boring, I'd like to throw in a few extra wrinkles. (My ultimate goal is for fights to have a sort of tactical board-game feel to them). If you and your opponent have equal ranks, I'm calling it a Clash.


Approach: At the start of a scene, everyone declares an Approach, tentatively titled "Aggressive, Defensive, Reactive." When you Clash someone, your approach can give you Advantage, in a rock-paper-scissors sort of thing: Aggressive beats Defensive, Defensive beats Reactive, and Reactive beats Aggressive. Switching your Approach mid-scene would normally require an action.

Momentum: Each character would have a (hopefully unique) sequence of things that would grant them Momentum, a one-time Advantage on their next roll. So, like, one character might have "Rolling Victory: If you make three successful checks in a row using the same skill, gain Advantage on the next." Another might have "Jack of All Trades: If you make three different checks in a row, your fourth unique check gains Advantage." Things like that to shape how you approach challenges.

(Or, like, maybe based on the current tactical situation? "If you have three adjacent foes, you have Advantage?")

Health: I figure some sort of injury system? Hadn't quite gotten this far.

Ultimately, I'd like fights to be quick and tactical: Match your Approach to your opponent's, line up your Momentum while foiling your foes', and knock the bad guy for a loop. Minions would be around mostly to set up Momentum, though perhaps some sort of aid another schtick could make them threatening...


Hero Points: I generally like having at least something like hero points around, and I think I'd like to use them here. Spend a point, get Advantage. Something like that.

[Hate9]

I definitely like some of your ideas here. Have you ever checked out MURPG?

[Grod_The_Giant]

I definitely like some of your ideas here. Have you ever checked out MURPG?
No, I haven't... from some quick googling, though, it doesn't quite look like what I'm after-- seems like it's mostly centered around bidding, which isn't a mechanic I'm terribly interested in?

[Jormengand]

There are two games I'm going to mention here: Athesia and Battles in the Rust.

Athesia is a role-playing game concieved of by the RPG society at the university of Essex which uses a resource management system for you to achieve goals. Summarised quickly, you have three traits which each start with an interest point at the start of each session. If you attempt something hard, the GM assigns it a difficulty and you can either spend that many interest points in relevant traits and narrate your success, or gain one interest point in any trait and the GM narrates your failure. You generally can't try to do the same thing later if you fail, though.

Of course, vancian casting and other resource management ideas come to mind. While some of the D&D spells do require rolls, there's nothing about the idea of vancian casting which says that rolls are necessary.

The other thing I was going to mention is Battles in the Rust, which is the result of my own grappling with a dislike of dice and especially absolute failure mechanics. It's not an RPG: instead it's a tabletop wargame, but one thing that I did notice is that you can get surprisingly close to just having a system where you always hit and do nonrandom damage without the lack of chance actualy reducing the tactical element. You do, though, need a few interesting abilities to mix things up (BitR has things like firebombs which only explode after enemies have had a chance to get out the way, and fanatics which might just run off at the enemy if your commander isn't able to stop them, and so forth) so that people can't settle into a routine which they know will win them the game, or otherwise use relatively simple game theory to maximise their chances easily.



If you're going to do this kind of thing you have to be a little clear about why you're removing the randomness. Given that you're making an uninformed choice with the rock-paper-scissors, it essentially is random. In Battles in the Rust, the only thing that is ever random is the choice of who gets the first turn if they're the same faction, because I've given up and admitted that there's no other way to do it than randomly. But BitR kinda owns the fact that the nonrandom aspect is artificial because it's gamist, not simulationist or narrativist. All RPGs, though, are ultimately narrativist - it's about the story they tell, not winning or losing - so being able to do things without a chance of failure can harm that narrative.

If you're walking around in D&D with a +14 to hide or in Athesia with one interest point, you always know that there's a chance you'll fail (though in Athesia, it's usually because you might choose to fail). In Sure-Thing, you don't have that chance of failure, just the absolute that either the thing you're attempting is possible or it's not. This takes away both suspense and meaningful choice. In D&D, for example, you might know that you have a better chance of killing the guard than sneaking past him but that killing him would waste time. In Sure-Thing, either you can sneak past him so you do or you can't so you knife him. In Athesia, you can choose whether to pass or fail unless you actually can't pay the points to pass, so you always have a measure of agency. In combat, you might have a chance do do something interesting - and BitR relies on the fact that your enemies also have agency to provide the measure of uncertainty that's normally provided by dice - but outside of it, your actions don't have the same meaning in the same way.

tl;dr I don't think that absolute lack of randomness really works for RPGs.

[Jasdoif]

Your approaches thing reminds me a bit of how the Cosmic Encounter board game (which I really wish I had more chances to play....) resolves conflicts. At the simplest, each of the two players plays an encounter card from their hand facedown, which are turned over simultaneously; either an attack card with a numeric bonus or a negotiate card. If both players play attack cards, whoever has the highest (number of ships + card bonus) total wins; if one plays an attack card and the other a negotiate card, the attacker wins but has to pay compensation to the other player; if both play negotiate cards, they have a set time limit to work out a deal they both agree with, or they both lose. The feature I find particularly interesting is that your hand persists from round to round, and outright redrawing for encounter cards is permitted only when you don't have any left to play. If you want to attack but only have negotiate cards, too bad.

...the connection to your proposal is kind of tenuous, but I was thinking "what stops someone from simply using their highest skill offensively over and over against a full-rank-lower defensive skill until they win?" What if they can't use the same skill over and over...or what if using the same skill twice in a conflict gives your opponents Advantage on their attacks, so it becomes better to use different skills than repeat the same activity over and over?

I bring this up because as it is, it seems like someone with a Superhero-scale defensive skill would be incredibly resilient against any number of attackers with Hero-scale attacks, because any attacker would need three sources of Advantage to overcome the scale difference; incentivizing skills with more obvious defense uses for players. Now, maybe that's okay; maybe emphasizing defense is intentional, or maybe skills won't map cleanly to general defenses like "dodge" or something. But randomness in general succinctly gives weaker characters the chance to pose threats to stronger challenges/challenges. If you're considering an injury system, you probably want conflict that lasts more than a round; and if you're doing that, you'll want to ensure the chance of variance between rounds (because otherwise the extra rounds are superfluous). If randomness isn't there to do it, you'd be well advised to have something else in place that does.

[Knaight]

If you're going for a tactical board game feel with combat, one option would be to really emphasize positioning, then do team initiative. As an example, you could have a combat number derived from skill level (this is to simplify the rest of the math). Then on each turn the whole team positions themselves, and every member of that team splits their combat number between all adjacent foes. This lets a skill N character reliably beat a skill N-1 character, but not necessarily 3 skill N-1 characters at once. Then you just decide how big of an advantage you want combat numbers to have (skill to CN of 1,2,4,8 produces a very different effect than skill to CN of 1,4,16,64 or 3,4,5,6). There's also how to fit in ranged combat, terrain, etc. but this works as a basic core mechanic and a lot of the rest can work within this framework pretty easily.

[Grod_The_Giant]

If you're going for a tactical board game feel with combat, one option would be to really emphasize positioning, then do team initiative. As an example, you could have a combat number derived from skill level (this is to simplify the rest of the math). Then on each turn the whole team positions themselves, and every member of that team splits their combat number between all adjacent foes. This lets a skill N character reliably beat a skill N-1 character, but not necessarily 3 skill N-1 characters at once. Then you just decide how big of an advantage you want combat numbers to have (skill to CN of 1,2,4,8 produces a very different effect than skill to CN of 1,4,16,64 or 3,4,5,6). There's also how to fit in ranged combat, terrain, etc. but this works as a basic core mechanic and a lot of the rest can work within this framework pretty easily.
So basically you'd have a calculation like "Athletics 1 + Physique 2 + Speed 0 = Fight 5" (or whatever), and when fighting multiple foes, you'd add up all their Fight scores to see who wins the exchange?

...this gives me the idea for a combat-structure based around a series of "exchanges." You'd have three rounds of movement/countermovement stuff, with skills and special abilities to re-shape the battlefield, after which attacks would be resolved based on current positioning and modifiers. Injured people could either concede or keep fighting with the penalty. Hmm...


Athesia is a role-playing game concieved of by the RPG society at the university of Essex which uses a resource management system for you to achieve goals. Summarised quickly, you have three traits which each start with an interest point at the start of each session. If you attempt something hard, the GM assigns it a difficulty and you can either spend that many interest points in relevant traits and narrate your success, or gain one interest point in any trait and the GM narrates your failure. You generally can't try to do the same thing later if you fail, though.
The GUMSHOE game I read works similarly. It's not a mechanic that particularly endears itself to me-- I'm not a big fan of resource-management games at the best of times (I've got a tendency to horde power uses if they take anything longer than a scene to refresh), and I worry how it would work if everything revolves around doling out skill checks in as tight-fisted a manner as possible.


The other thing I was going to mention is Battles in the Rust, which is the result of my own grappling with a dislike of dice and especially absolute failure mechanics. It's not an RPG: instead it's a tabletop wargame, but one thing that I did notice is that you can get surprisingly close to just having a system where you always hit and do nonrandom damage without the lack of chance actualy reducing the tactical element. You do, though, need a few interesting abilities to mix things up (BitR has things like firebombs which only explode after enemies have had a chance to get out the way, and fanatics which might just run off at the enemy if your commander isn't able to stop them, and so forth) so that people can't settle into a routine which they know will win them the game, or otherwise use relatively simple game theory to maximise their chances easily.
Mmm, yeah. You'd definitely need some mechanic to add variety within a conflict; if random chance is taken away, positioning/terrain and special abilities become that much more important.


tl;dr I don't think that absolute lack of randomness really works for RPGs.
Fair point on the rock/paper/scissors thing being basically random; some other mechanic would be better there... but as to the overall point, I dunno. To make it work, I think you'd have to de-abstract things a bit. Like, failing a Hide check traditionally might mean either that you tripped and made noise, or that you ran into an unexpected guard-- either an internal or external failure. For Sure-Thing, you'd be doing away with internal failure, meaning that you'd have to rely on external factors... and since there's no check, you'd have to actually place them in the world. Find ways to get Advantage to beat the equal-skill challenge...

[Knaight]

So basically you'd have a calculation like "Athletics 1 + Physique 2 + Speed 0 = Fight 5" (or whatever), and when fighting multiple foes, you'd add up all their Fight scores to see who wins the exchange?

There's a bunch of ways to handle it - the big thing is that if you're going with opposed combat directly it's often easier to just map the general skill ratings (0-3) to different numbers than the entire rest of the system to those general skill ratings. They're small numbers, which tends to mean having to come up with convoluted systems that just don't apply if that same 0-3 scale goes 1,2,4,8 instead of 0,1,2,3. That also gives you room to add in other stuff (e.g. equipment).

With that said: Throwing multiple skills together also works.

[Cluedrew]

I'm paraphrasing something someone said one: "You don't need randomness, you need uncertainty."

Which is to say the main thing I am worried that it will be too predictable, becoming a simulation instead of a game. Without randomness the best thing I can think of is keeping enough things changing, keep it dynamic enough that the outcome is not certain.

I like the positioning idea. Even one advantage for every ally would let a small group match or defeat a lone enemy of the next tier. Which then means the high tier has to try to split them up without facing them directly before they can attack directly.

Another idea is that the values you use might change depending on what exactly you are doing. For instance a straight on attack might use "power 0 + weapons 1" while flipping from a nearby rooftop might use "athletics 2 + weapons 1", but you got to go to the rooftop first.

Momentum... honestly I'm just seeing situational skill bonuses from this. I'm curious why only one for a character though. I could totally see someone playing at jack-of-all-trades (fourth unique check gets advantage) who strikes back (first check after losing health gains advantage). I see this being the most interesting part of your character, with the skills being a base.

Approach might work better as a per-scene source of momentum. Maybe not even something you "decide" so much as your character is always assumed to be using the approach they had at the start of the scene. Following that might get you some advantage (reckless abandon: gain advantage whenever you focus on the attack at the expense of defence). Although changing approach, swinging your momentum around. Would then have to cost a bit more than a simple action. Maybe a Hero Point?

I see you having different types of Health for different types of encounters, if you have any sort of conventional health system at all. HP pool type health doesn't really fly because I can't see the idea of an exchange of blows working. One solution might be the opposite, instead of tracking health, track injuries. Every time you get hurt, loss/drop out of the clash or take an injury (a possible source of disadvantage later, and be something like a virus if you are hacking).

For some reason I'm getting a weird FATE/Chess hybrid feel from this. Which is a strange combination. I don't know if this would hold true in practice, but I feel advantage would have to fly thick and fast for this to work. Under the current draft, you need 3 advantage more than your opponent to swing a check even one rank. I mean maybe advantage is just the tie breaker most of the time and it is mostly adjusting tier via other tricks that swings clashes?

I like this thread so far.

[MoleMage]

What about a hidden hand type thing, where each character has a set number (say 5) of values that they can assign to actions in any given period of time (call it a scene). So a character has 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, for example (or 1, 1, 2, 2, 3; or whatever). When you start to do a thing, each character assigns their values to a number of fields (attack, defense, initiative, skill, etc.). The numbers are static (nonrandom) but variable. Just spitballing there.


For health, you could make health apply as a penalty to certain skills (depending on combat style, and with multiple options to choose from for every case) where the defender picks the affected skill each time. When your total injuries reduce any one of your HP skills to 0, you are knocked out?

EDIT: Whoops. Didn't mean to necromancy this thread I just like reading the original system threads and sorted by that tag...

[2D8HP]

Didn't mean to necromancy this thread I just like reading the original system threads and sorted by that tag....
It's within 45 days, so your good.

[D20ragon]

What about a hidden hand type thing, where each character has a set number (say 5) of values that they can assign to actions in any given period of time (call it a scene). So a character has 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, for example (or 1, 1, 2, 2, 3; or whatever). When you start to do a thing, each character assigns their values to a number of fields (attack, defense, initiative, skill, etc.). The numbers are static (nonrandom) but variable. Just spitballing there.


For health, you could make health apply as a penalty to certain skills (depending on combat style, and with multiple options to choose from for every case) where the defender picks the affected skill each time. When your total injuries reduce any one of your HP skills to 0, you are knocked out?

EDIT: Whoops. Didn't mean to necromancy this thread I just like reading the original system threads and sorted by that tag...

Huh, I like that. I might try some iteration of that sometime. You could even add more variables if you wanted, action types that break ties, etc. ("alright everyone, reveal hand" "I chose a 4 strike" "your foe chose a 4 parry, parry beats strike, he's successful in his parry.") Just spitballing.

[Grod_The_Giant]

What about a hidden hand type thing, where each character has a set number (say 5) of values that they can assign to actions in any given period of time (call it a scene). So a character has 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, for example (or 1, 1, 2, 2, 3; or whatever). When you start to do a thing, each character assigns their values to a number of fields (attack, defense, initiative, skill, etc.). The numbers are static (nonrandom) but variable. Just spitballing there.


For health, you could make health apply as a penalty to certain skills (depending on combat style, and with multiple options to choose from for every case) where the defender picks the affected skill each time. When your total injuries reduce any one of your HP skills to 0, you are knocked out?

EDIT: Whoops. Didn't mean to necromancy this thread I just like reading the original system threads and sorted by that tag...
This was pretty dead, unfortunately. I couldn't really put the thought into a form I liked (beyond a very free-form thing, I guess), and ran out of interest in making and maintaining a second homebrew system.

As for your specific suggestion, bidding-type mechanics are a good replacement for die rolls, just not one I particularly enjoy.

[endlessxaura]

Regardless that this project is dead, this is something everyone in this thread should read. It's pretty enlightening and is helping me create my RPG project:

http://rpg-design.wikidot.com/evaluation

[SkipSandwich]

Lancer is a mecha-based rpg with an interesting way of handling pilot actions outside thier mecha. In most cases so long as you have a relevant Trait(one word descriptor chosen by the player) or Expertise (set of skills granted by a chosen character Background), you automatically succeed, or at least have Accuracy (which works similarly to 5e's Advantage, you roll 1d6 and add it your final result, multiple instances of Accuracy do not stack, only the highest rolled bonus applies). When attempting any check with a degree of danger, on a failed roll you cross off one of your traits and lose access to it until you can Rest, if you lose all of your Traits, you die.

Players start with their choice of three Traits (two positive descriptors and one negative), though certain Talents (feat trees) can grant bonus traits such as Leader or Veteran as part of their effects.

I like this system because not only does it mirror the way that mechs take damage (fine until reduced to zero hp, then they just keep taking critical damage, having more and more systems and weapons disabled and destroyed until they finally roll too high on the crit damage chart and explode), and also because its your character's Narrative Potency that determines how far or close from death they are. The more named descriptors attached to your character, the more ways you can act to advance the narrative, once all of your narrative potential has been exhausted, you die.

something like this could work very well in a true diceless system I think, as I can imagine a setting where players can invoke certain traits to allow them to do things related to that trait, and always succeed unless they are actively Opposed, at which point they can either Back Down, which allows them to retreat from the scene without taking damage(but also forfeiting their ability to affect the outcome going forward), or else Push On, allowing them to succeed anyway by sacrificing one of their Traits, which could potentially result in various complications further on down the line.